Dolphin Software Products on Apple Mac Platform

See John Major’s own description of his Apple Mac based system, which encompasses Design & Program production via Dolphin CAD-CAM and full CNC control via Mach3 and UC100 device, click here to view video URL now.

From time to time over recent years we at Dolphin have been questioned about availability of our products on Apple Mac PCs, our stock response has been along the lines of “Our development environment is on PC Windows and we have very little experience of Mac PCs but if any Client wishes to attempt installation we will give whatever help we can”.

Clients have succeeded in the installation of Partmaster on Mac PCs but until now we have not had access to sufficient details to be able to share the project on our website. After getting involved with two existing clients who wished to move their Dolphin Software to Apple Mac PCs we can now announce that Dolphin software can be installed on Apple Mac systems (with increased performance over the previous PC platform) and provide details of the process.

A UK client, John Major, was able to successfully move his Dolphin 3DCam package from PC to Mac. John has been kind enough to provide a video of his project and details of the products employed (shown below), John says “Using widely available tools, such as Parallels (V13), I have been able to port Mach3 and Dolphin 3DCam to a Mac PC (improved execution times being a welcome by-product), with the use of a UC100 USB Motion Controller Mach3 controls the Machine Tool directly from the Mac PC. The project was a complete success and I am satisfied that the time & resources were invested wisely”.

During a routine support call with Daniel of Smart Engineering (UK) we mentioned John’s success with the Mac, this sparked interest from Daniel and he asked for further details regarding the method and tools used. The eventual outcome of the call was Daniel also reporting success (with performance increase) in porting his Dolphin Partmaster package from a PC Windows platform to Apple Mac with Parallels software. Daniel is in his 2nd year of using Partmaster and on becoming aware of the success reported by John Major with Apple Mac requested further information and subsequently took the opportunity to retire his existing PC for use as a Linux platform and move Partmaster to an Apple Mac. Daniel reports that the process was relatively stress free and intends to produce a detailed review of his experiences with this project in the near future, for the moment he is happy to report that his system “runs well on the Mac and I am satisfied that this was a worthwhile exercise”. We look forward to receiving Daniel’s review in due course.

Note:John mentions that a vital component of the UC100 package was the Technical Data and levels of support supplied by CNC4YOU and advises when sourcing items like this online the buyer should always be satisfied the vendor is equipped to provide the necessary support.

John’s complete system is shown above, the CNC Controller is linked to the Apple Mac via the UC100 Motion Controller.

On the above Platform john installed dolphin 3DCam and Mach3, go to https://youtu.be/1GSc1zGo6r0 to view the video showing John’s system at work or see below for the embedded video.